Dozens
of alligator carcasses lie on a dry lake bed after being clubbed to
death and skinned by Paraguayan peasants during a daily hunt in General
Diaz, 550 kilometers northeast of Asuncion. Tens of thousands of alligators
known locally as yacares, were left stranded as their lakes began to
dry up more than ten years ago after Paraguay and Argentina diverted
the Pilcomayo River for crop irrigation, without taking into account
the environmental impact. The Paraguayan government has authorized the
slaughter for meat and hides of thousands of yacares that are expected
to die anyway due to the lack of water in what is considered
Paraguay's greatest ecological disaster.

August
3

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of the Day

Where
has this guy been hiding, you almost couldn't recognize him off the
milk carton images from last november.

August
4

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of the Day

I
find it mind-boggling that the president can just take a 30-day vacation
at his own whim. I think he needs to prioritize better.
Building a house for a day, just think of all the people that would
pay millions to get face time with the president of the US for a day.

August
5

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of the Day

August
6

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Man
Drowns in Cat's Water BowlWELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New
Zealand man has died after slipping on ice and drowning in his cat's
water bowl, local media said Thursday. Peter John Robinson, who
was 28, was found by his mother lying face down in the dish in the South
Island town of Reefton last month, the New Zealand Herald reported.

Gill
Robinson said she believed her son had gone to feed his cat, Piper,
and hit his head after slipping on ice. The inch-and-a-half of water
in the bowl was enough to cover his mouth and was taken into his lungs.
A coroner found that Robinson, who had had balance problems since being
born without one ear, had drowned following a significant head injury,
the Herald said.

August
7

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of the Day

I
wish I had my own super computer to play with, I'd get some excellent
animation rendering out of it.

LIVERMORE,
Calif. - A U.S. government laboratory unveiled on Wednesday the most
powerful computer in the world, programmed to simulate the explosion
of a nuclear bomb. ASCI White, a $110 million computer squeezed
into enough refrigerator sized units to fill a couple of basketball
courts, wasofficially
unveiled by scientists aiming to simulate nuclear tests the government
has promised not to carry out for real.

The
beast, built by International Business Machines Corp. from off-the-shelf
processors with a souped-up version of its commercial operating system,
AIX, weighs as much as 17 full-size elephants, takes as much cooling
as 765 homes, and can do in a second what a calculator would take 10
million years, IBM says.

Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, a government funded laboratory which
is home to the machine, aims to find out a bit quicker than that how
an atomic bomb blows up so that it does not have to test any more.

The
last U.S. underground test was about 10 years ago.
Like gunfighters after the taming of the West, U.S. nuclear
scientists who have designed and exploded nuclear weapons are a dying
breed. Computers are being brought in to fill the gap. The
10-year Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, ASCI, is about half-way
done. It aims to produce a computer that can simulate a nuclear
explosion by 2005, with a machine that can do 100 trillion calculations
per second, compared to ASCI White's 12.3 trillion.

Compaq
Computer Corp. is working on an intermediate step and plans to deliver
within a couple of years a 30-trillion per second calculator.

August
8

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of the Day

Unix
System Administrator Steve Marchi opens the back door of one node of
ASCI White, the world's most powerful computer, Wednesday, Aug.
15, 2001, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
ASCI White contains 8,192 microprocessors, is capable of 12.3 trillion
operations per second, and will be used by the lab to simulate
nuclear weapons tests.

August
9

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of the Day

Imagine
being in training for a war from the age that you could hold a fake
wooden gun. I'm glad I didn't have to do this when I turned 12.

August
10

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of the Day

So
when does this "conflict" finally start being called the war that it
is. I think they should try an assassination attempt on Arafat
like they tried on Saddam Hussein.

August
11

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of the Day

Nothing
like being in the top 10,000 people to run in a race of over 30,000
people. Just don't drop you wallet on the marathon run, because
you won't be finding it in the lost and found box.

August
12

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of the Day

I
don't understand why the government can spend a billion dollars to develop
a vertical take of plane, yet I see little development towards a consumer
vertical take-off vehicles for recreational use. We've been dreaming
of hovercraft vehicles for ages, why don't we start developing one.

August
13

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of the Day

Here's
a diving pig. What have you taught you pet to do lately?? I can't
seem to make mine not start playing around my bed at the crack of dawn.

August
14

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of the Day

August
15

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of the Day

I
finished nailing up all my pickets today for my fence today, now I just
need to go back and add the third runners.

August
16

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of the Day

Amy
Kantor's Dad moved on to another world today. It's interesting
to see how someone's attachment to their spouse can help tie them to
this world. How much could your accomplish in 5 years in the afterlife
world.

August
17

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August
18

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of the Day

Advertising
in ice, now there's a short term adtertising medium. That's almost
as bad a paying to get a crop plane to draw something in the sky with
smoke.

August
19

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of the Day

Ouch!!!
These arer actual burns from a natural gas explosion

August
20

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August
21

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August
22

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August
23

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of the Day

Scientists
Warn of Possible Atlantic Monster WaveLONDON
- The eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands could trigger a``mega-tsunami''
that would devastate Atlantic coastlines with waves as high as 330 feet,
scientists said on Wednesday. They said an eruption of the Cumbre
Vieja volcano on La Palma, part of the Spanish island chain off West
Africa, was likely to cause a massive chunk of rock to break off,
crashing into the sea and kicking up huge walls of water higher
than any other in recorded history.

The
tsunami would be capable of traveling huge distances at up to 500
miles an hour, the scientists said in a research paper to be published
in September's Geophysical Research Letters. Simon Day, of the
Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at the University College of London,
said that as the volcano was not erupting at present, the short-term
and medium-term risks were ``negligible.'' But Cumbre Vieja should
be monitored closely for any signs of activity so that emergency services
could plan an effective response, he said.``Eruptions
of Cumbre Vieja occur at intervals of decades to a century or so and
there may be a number of eruptions before its collapse,'' said Day,
who collaborated on the research with Steven Ward of the University
of California. ``Although the year-to-year probability of a collapse
is therefore low, the resulting tsunami would be a major disaster
with indirect effects around the world.''

The
effects would spread north, west and south of the Canaries, with the
west Sahara bearing the worst of the wave's energy. The energy
released by the collapse would be equal to the electricity consumption
of the entire United States in half a year. Immediately after
the landslide, a dome of water 3,000 feet high and tens of miles
wide would form, only to collapse and rebound.As
the landslide rubble moved deeper under water, a tsunami would develop.
Within 10 minutes, the tsunami would have moved a distance of almost
155 miles. On the west Saharan shore, waves would probably reach
heights of 330 feet.Florida
and the Caribbean, the final north Atlantic destinations to be affected
by the tsunami, would have to brace themselves for 165 foot waves some
eight to nine hours after the landslide. Wave heights toward Europe
would be smaller, but substantial waves would hit the coasts of Britain,
Spain, Portugal and France. The research paper estimated water would
penetrate several miles inland and that the devastation would cause
trillions of dollars in damage.

August
24

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of the Day

Guess
how big this bull is. It's about the size of the tip of your hair
folicle. Genetic advertising is right around the corner.
Get favorite company branded onto you skin and get $5.99 a month!!

August
25

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of the Day

How
many tomatoes does it take for a tomatoe war. About 130 tons apparantly
were used in the latest annual tomatoe festival in spain

August
26

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of the Day

More
brainwashing of kids, at what point does a kids get trained to strap
a stick of dynomite to themself all in the name of greed.

August
27

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How
bigger, badder Code Red worms are being builtAs
I write this, there are two new fast-spreading Internet worms for Windows
users: Apost does the now-familiar "e-mail itself to everyone" thing
we've come to expect from Windows worms and viruses, except this worm
sends multiple copies of itself. And then there's an updated version
of Magistr, redesigned to infect even more users with its destructive
payload. Faster propagation has been the trend with Win32 viruses and
worms, but what if rapid propagation methods were employed for network-savvy
worms such as Code Red? Well, someone has already given thought to that.

Andy
Warhol is famous for saying "In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes
of fame." Nicolas Weaver at UC Berkeley has written a paper proposing
that virus writers constructing some future Code Red-like worm add a
list of 10,000 to 50,000 "well connected" Internet servers, then launch
the virus. The advantage, he argues, is that even if only 10 to 20 percent
of the servers are vulnerable to the worm's exploit, that would stillbe
an enormous jump on Code Red and previous worms. Weavers adds that the
initial 10 percent infection could be achieved in the first minute or
so; he then proposes that his "uberworm" could infect most of the Internet
within 15 minutes (hence the Warhol worm).

NOT
TO BE OUTDONE, the team of Suart Staniford, Gary Grim, and Roelof Jonkman
at Silicon Defense proposed an even greater propagation rate: they claim
they can infect the Internet in 30 seconds. They argue that a worm writer
could scan the Internet in advance and identify almost all of thevulnerable
systems on the Internet before launching the worm. With a very fast
Internet connection (they mention an OC12 link), they argue even a 48MB
address list of vulnerable Internet address could be sent out in about
4 minutes.

Jose
Nazario, a biochemist by trade who has previously offered valuable insights
on digital worms, points out that neither of these papers take into
account the basic elements of propagation on the Internet. Nazario points
to an IBM paper called "How Topology Affects Population Dynamics," whichlooks
at lessons learned from biological infections and how, with an understanding
of this model, programmers might better design future digital organisms
(they don't specifically say "worms").Basically,
the authors of both the Warhol and Flash worms assumed a very simple
Internet model where every node to be infected is a neighbor of every
other node. The reality is much more complicated. That's what Nazario
says torpedoes the technical merits of both of these studies.

SO
WHY even mention this research? Nicolas Weaver himself posts that he
is leaving his paper up online so that people can understand, with documentation,
what danger there is in a homogenous Internet. Someone will attempt
to do what these authors have proposed, and someone might someday make
a worm that "flashes" the entire Internet with a malicious payload.
Rather than be caught unaware, isn't it better to realize this is out
there and take steps to minimize its impact?

Weaver
proposes that companies use context-sensitive firewalls where only "that
which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden." He further suggests internal
firewalls throughout the company and regular security audits. He adds,
"regular backups are also essential." He further suggests that: "Homogenous
populations, whether in potatoes or computers, are always more vulnerable
to diseases." That's something to remember when implementing one or
multiple types of servers on your network. Just as biodiversity has
kept life going on Earth, mixing up one's operating systems can only
strengthen the Internet. .

August
28

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of the Day

Here's
what a baby panda looks like.

August
29

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of the Day

It
seems that the US post office is refusing to ship live baby chicks theses
days. What is the world comming to when you can't even ship your
produce animals to market.

August
30

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of the Day

How
much would you pay for a real puppy? $50... $100... Now how much
would you pay for a robot puppy? How's $800 for the opportunity
to listen to a robotic bark that needs batteries replaced every week.
You thought dog food was expensive, think about replaceing 4 AA batteries
every week.

August
31

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of the Day

A
one Crown coin featuring fictional wizard Harry Potter, created by best-selling
author J.K. Rowling, is seen in this photo released by the Pobjoy mint.
The coin, legal tender in the Isle of Man but more valuable as a collectors
item, features Harry on one side and an image of the British monarch,
who gave her clearance for the coin on the reverse side. The coin is
worth about $0.375.